‘Vertigo’: Alfred Hitchcock’s film will have a remake with Robert Downey Jr. as the protagonist

Put to remake a movie, why not remake one of the most acclaimed jewels of the seventh art? Quite a brave test. Now Paramount Pictures has accepted the challenge and is developing a new version of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1958 psychological thriller, ‘Vertigo’one of the best movies in the history of cinema.

And there already seems to be a possible protagonist for the role that James Stewart played in his day: nothing more and nothing less than Robert Downey Jr.. The actor is also producing the project with his wife Susan Downey through their production company Team Downey, along with John Davis. and John Fox through Davis Entertainment.

The creator of ‘Peaky Blinders’, Steven Knight, would be in charge of writing the scriptwhich he would get on on the heels of his commitment to write an untitled ‘Star Wars’ movie for Lucasfilm.

Downey hasn’t been very active since his last release with Marvel, 2019’s ‘Avengers: Endgame’, one of the best superhero movies. In 2020 he released ‘Dolittle’. He produced and appears in the documentary ‘Mr.,’ centering on his father, and he will next appear this July in Christopher Nolan’s historical epic ‘Oppenheimer,’ opposite Cillian Murphy. But otherwise, Downey’s dance card has remained remarkably open.

The original ‘Vertigo’ starred James Stewart as John “Scottie” Ferguson, a San Francisco police detective who retires due to a crippling fear of heights brought on by a bad case of vertigo. After he’s hired to track the wife of an acquaintance, Madeleine (Kim Novak), Scottie becomes obsessed with her, but her fears render him unable to save her when she climbs the tower of a Spanish mission and plunges into it. her death. And then things get really weird.

Considered to this day as one of the best films in cinema history, ‘Vertigo’ was not a huge success when it first opened in theaters and divided critics. It was a few decades later that it began to gain recognition as a masterpiece. In a 1982 survey of the best films by the British Film Institute’s publication Sight and Sound (conducted every 10 years), ‘Vertigo’ entered the top 10 and continued to climb the list, peaking at number one on the list. 2012 poll. (Variety recently ranked “Vertigo” 32nd on its list of the 100 Greatest Movies Ever Made.)

The film has surpassed in popularity the French novel on which it was inspired, ‘D’entre les morts’, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. The book follows the same plot as ‘Vertigo’, although it is set in Paris during the height of World War II and the ending is also different.

It is not the first time that a Hitchcock film has had a remake. In fact, the filmmaker himself made a remake of one of his films, remaking his 1934 film ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’ into a new film in 1956, with James Stewart and Doris Day.

One of the most popular was the new version of ‘Psycho’ directed by Gus Van Sant in 1998. In 2020, Netflix produced a new version of ‘Rebecca’, the 1940 classic in which the roles of Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine were played by Armie Hammer and Lily James. That is one of the examples that a new version of a classic is not always a good idea. For sample you can see the worst movie remakes.

In addition, filmmakers as varied as Brian De Palma (with ‘Fascination’ and ‘Body Double’), David Lynch (‘Mulholland Drive”), Mel Brooks (‘Maximum Anxiety’) or François Ozon (‘A New Friend’) have Very much inspired by ‘Vertigo’ No studio had dared with a complete new version until now.